Available resources

Bionet

Fast, reliable, automatically backed up but fairly small storage space

Consists of two fiber channel disk filers (bionet and bionet2 located on the 3rd floor in building 68) that have about 3TB of usable storage shared among several labs. Data on this system is mirrored to NearStore R200 in building NE47 (as of 2007-06-04).

Lab storage space (as of 2007-06-19):

total: 200GB

available: 88GB

Problems with bionet:

Not enough space to backup microscope images

As of 2007-06-04, bionet and bionet2 are out of the support contract; R200 is under a support contract paid for by the Biology Department. It means that if bionet filers fail, there should be a copy of the data stored on R200 in building NE47.

R200

Not backed up anywhere: no off-site backup and no snapshots (only single copy of data exists). It means that if you are using this space, you should have a backup of this data stored elsewhere.

Potential solutions

One server

Primary storage:

current user and project data on lab desktops and Bionet

microscope data on the scope G5 with an extra hard drive

old user and project data on shmoo with an extra hard drive

Backup storage: Bionet mirror in NE47 and a NAS box with 1.5TB of usable storage; cost: ~$1,500. Biosupport would provide maintenance for free.

Two servers

Primary storage:

current individual and project data on lab desktops and Bionet

microscope and old data on a new storage server with a RAID array (e.g., 4 x 500GB drives in RAID 5 configuration would provide about 1.5TB of usable storage space). Cost: ~$2,000. Host it in the BioMicro Center on the 3rd floor of building 68. Biosupport would provide maintenance for free.

Backup storage: second identical server (~$2,000) or a NAS box (~$1,500) and host it in Tech Square (NE47). Biosupport would provide maintenance for free.

Temporary

Primary storage:

current user and project data on lab desktops and Bionet

microscope data on the scope G5 with an extra hard drive

old user and project data on shmoo with an extra hard drive

Backup storage: MIT TSM for backing up microscope data from the scope G5 ("soft limit" of 300GB per machine as of June 2007). Cost: unknown monthly fee (currently $7.50/month for 300GB).